Postcards from The Pug Bus

Lifting a satirical leg on popular culture

Persons in the Ether

Question of the Week

Passion or stability?

MD

Mavis Drouk, emotional escrow officer

Believed to be near Harrisburg, PA

Stability. Passion is what people choose when they still believe a staircase can be made entirely of sparks. Stability may not sing outside your window, but it does remember where the insurance cards are.

RC

Rufus Clenn, freelance thunder consultant

Last reported west of Tulsa, OK

Passion, obviously. Stability is just boredom wearing shoes with arch support. I want life to arrive late, smell faintly of lightning, and explain nothing until several lamps have been broken.

NV

Nora Vell, deputy curator of small regrets

Possibly sheltering in Eugene, OR

Passion is useful for beginnings, stability for the paperwork afterward. I prefer both in moderation, which is another way of saying I would like to be ruined briefly and then driven home safely.

Web Founder, Tim Berners-Lee, Finally Admits He Misspelled Worldwide

11 years philmaggitti

A baby curiously touching a man's face while he lies on grass.

GENEVA – Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world wide web, finally has admitted that he misspelling “worldwide” when he created the web twenty years ago.

Mr. Berners-Lee was employed as a junior programmer at a nuclear research center near Geneva, Switzerland, when he wrote a proposal that led eventually to the creation of the world wide web. He told an audience at the twentieth-anniversary party for that proposal on Friday that if he could “re-jigger” anything about the web, the spelling of “worldwide” would be it.

“Obviously I wrote the code for the web at a time when spelling checkers weren’t as trustworthy as they are today,” said Mr. Berners-Lee.

“I’ve never been able to spell for merdee, myself,” he laughed, “and the spelling checker I used wasn’t for merdee either, so I spelled ‘worldwide’ as two words instead of one.”

Mr. Berners-Lee, a British software engineer who is now a physical education instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that if he had a Euro for every time somebody pointed out his mistake to him, “I’d be a rich bastard today.”

Next on Mr. Berners-Lee’s list of regrets was his decision to begin web addresses with “http://.”

“The double slashes following ‘http:’ are obviously redundant,” he said, “and that has led to billions of wasted keystrokes at who knows what cost to the environment.

“Obviously keyboards weren’t as trustworthy when I wrote the code for the web as they are today,” said Mr. Berners-Lee, “and even though I could have sworn I hit the forward-slash key only once, it registered two slashes every time instead.”

In related news, Mr. Berners-Lee said he was concerned that the world wide web “will become a giant eavesdropping device” that will allow “corrupt institutions like the Recording Industry Association of America” to spy on innocent file-sharing activities, “which is why I created the web in the first place–to allow scientists to exchange music and pictures of their grandkids more easily.”

The preceding is satire. Straight up, Skippy. No warranties are expressed or implied. For life advice, try a professional. For investment tips, try a dart board. For salvation, the gentleman in the robe has been handling that portfolio for 2,000 years.

The Pug Bus Breaking News

The Pug Bus Breaking News requires no email address, no mother's maiden name, no first pet's nickname, and no DNA sample. You simply mash the link below and read.

Deliver It

⚡ Scholars at the Royal Institute for the Advancement of Obvious Things have concluded, after eleven years of exhaustive inquiry, that people who speak at great length in meetings do not thereby become more correct. The findings have been submitted to a committee for review.

⚡ It has been determined by authorities in several jurisdictions that the phrase "I just want to be honest with you" reliably precedes the portion of the conversation one would most prefer not to have. Legislation is pending.

⚡ The Bureau of Perpetual Reassessment has announced that this is not, in fact, the most divided the nation has ever been, a distinction that continues to belong to a prior era when the disagreements concerned rather more consequential matters and people occasionally died over them.

Adverse Effects

The following lines of prose cleverly arranged as poetry may induce brief clarity, misplaced certainty, and the sense that something has already been decided without your approval ...

By seventy you know which doors you walked past without opening,
can name the rooms you never entered,
hear the echoes anyway.

Read It All

By seventy you know which doors you walked past without opening,
can name the rooms you never entered,
hear the echoes anyway.

The years do not accuse.
They simply pile up like newspapers you meant to read,
each one carrying news that is no longer news.

You think: I should have said that differently.
I should have stayed. I should have gone.
The mind is efficient this way,
filing the same cases under the same wrong headings,
finding them again at 3 a.m. in perfect order.

What surprises is not the weight of it
but the patience —
how regret waits,
how it has nowhere else to be,
how it sits across from you at breakfast
and asks for nothing,
knowing you will offer it everything
on your own.

The body slows.
The catalog does not.
You carry the unlived lives
the way old houses carry
the smell of people who are gone —
not haunting exactly,
just present,
just there,
just refusing
the simple courtesy
of leaving.